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One of the many pieces of evidence put forward for the existence of Planet X over the last few decades is the so-called ‘Pioneer anomaly’. The two Pioneer spacecraft were sent on an incredible voyage across the solar system, visiting a number of planets as they went. They not only imaged these planets, but used the gravity of the planets to accelerate onwards, deeper into the solar system. This gravity assist is often used to allow spacecrafts to pick up speed. As the Pioneer probes travelled across the outer planetary zone and on towards the Heliopause beyond in the 1990s, it became apparent that the craft were not moving away from the solar system quite as quickly as the theoretical trajectory projections demanded. Something was essentially slowing them down. Additionally, similar effects were noted for the Galileo and Ulysses probes.

Many ideas were put forward, including either gravitational or physical interaction with clouds of interplanetary dust in the Kuiper Belt, or even the added gravitational tug of an undiscovered Planet X body. One of the lead researchers into the Pioneer anomaly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was John Anderson (1), who, interestingly, also had a longstanding interest in the possible existence of a Planet X body (2). At one point, puzzled physicists began to wonder whether this marginal but definitive anomaly might require new laws of physics (3). In the end, it was agreed by technical experts that the anomalous deceleration was a result of radiation pressure caused by non-uniform heat loss from the probes (4,5). Flights of fancy about missing planets and new physics were promptly put to bed.

Despite this, the anomaly seems to persist in the increasingly accurate navigation and telemetry data returning from various spacecraft performing flybys past the Earth (6). Similarly, the Juno spacecraft, now orbiting fairly closely around Jupiter, is reported to be slightly misplaced from its expected position (7). This has been determined by looking at the Doppler shift of ranging data from the probe as it circumnavigated the poles of the great gas giant. Quixotically, Juno did not exhibit the same anomalous behaviour during a previous flyby of Earth. This suggests that this is not, then, the result of an internal machination of the probe itself, as described for the Pioneer probes. Instead, there does appear to be an unexplained external effect worth exploring:

“Another mystery is that while in some cases the anomaly was clear, in others it was on the threshold of detectability or simply absent – as was the case with Juno‘s flyby of Earth in October of 2013. The absence of any convincing explanation has led to a number of explanations, ranging from the influence or dark matter and tidal effects to extensions of General Relativity and the existence of new physics. However, none of these have produced a substantive explanation that could account for flyby anomalies.” (8) Read More…